Animism

Basic animism holds that the universe is full of spirits who are mostly indifferent to earth and humanity. Dealing with them is always dangerous because human beings mean little to them. Animism holds that anything can have its own spirit, from rocks to plants to animals. A visitor to an East African city-state in the 12th century noted that the local people believed that everything had its own spirit. However, the details of animistic beliefs of the region are vague. Different cultures had their own variations on animism, suggesting that for many Africans, an animistic religion had preceded their religions of ancestor worship and of paying homage to gods. For instance, in some African societies woodworkers had supernatural powers because they carved masks and wooden images of the dead or of deities that were inhabited by the actual spirits of the dead or the gods during religious rituals. Finding wood suitable for such purposes meant that one had to locate a tree with the right spiritual qualities, something the woodworker was trained to do. Smelters of metal would talk to the spirits in the metal. Animals often had spiritual duties, especially acting as messengers for gods or as spirits aiding magicians. Even though Muslim and Christian missionaries often regarded such animistic beliefs as mere superstition, they were unable to stop converts from still talking to plants, animals, and inanimate objects, just as they were unable to shake Africans of their belief that their ancestors were present in their lives. Many Muslims found this situation to be advantageous; their ability to read and write meant that they had spiritual power, and Africans would often consult Muslims as they would consult a traditional African priest. This practice was one way in which Muslims won converts.

An example of animistic belief comes from the Kyama of Benin. It reflects a common occurrence in the medieval kingdoms of western and central Africa: disputes between brothers over the right to be king. There is a long and complex story about King Ozolua, who has two sons. The legal heir is Esigie, a physically weak but highly intelligent man. The other son, Aruan, is physically strong but not as intelligent as his brother. King Ozolua favors the quiet and pleasant Aruan, but in contests between the brothers Esigie always wins. In spite of the law, King Ozolua gives Aruan the symbols of kingship: a magic sword and a special necklace. When the king dies, Esigie steals the king’s corpse and buries it in the town of Benin, even though the king had wished to be buried in the town of Udo. Aruan charges a slave with preparing a place for him in the next life, and the slave creates a huge lake where Aruan can go. When Aruan goes to war against his brother, he tells his servants that if they hear him ring a bell he has fastened to hairs on his chest, they will know that he is dead and can throw all his wives, slaves, and possessions into the lake. As he rides to battle, the bell falls from his chest hairs, and his servants hear it ring and obey his orders. In grief, Aruan drowns himself in the lake. Esigie of Benin becomes the ruler of the kingdom. Aruan’s spirit inhabits the lake, and every five days, once a week in his culture, he emerges from the lake and wanders Udo. The elements in this story are animistic because the story tells of the origin of a lake spirit.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

The Spread of Buddhism

Buddhism had begun as a sixth-century b.c.e. reform movement against the rigid rules and caste hierarchy of developing Hindu India. Buddhism accepted the basic teachings of earlier Hindu scriptures regarding ritual and social order and the explanation of life and death. The Upanishads explained that a divine essence was the source of all existence and that human souls were created from this essence. Humans were expected to behave in morally pure ways, and if they did not—if they sinned—then they were subject to reincarnation. Reincarnation is rebirth in another human or animal form in the next lifetime, and countless deaths and rebirths occurred until the individual soul was cleansed of sin. Purity finally led to salvation, which allowed the soul to become one with the divine.

Buddhism, based in the teachings of the Buddha, the historical Gautama Siddhartha (b. 563 b.c.e.), rejected the notion that only those who held elite positions in society or only males could gain salvation. Buddhism taught that moral thoughts and moral actions were sufficient in themselves. Buddhists criticized the Hindu scriptural emphasis on rituals and detached meditation as also being elitist and beyond the means of hard-working commoners. In the Buddhist “Middle Way,” the key to salvation was rejection of self-serving material desires in favor of being a better member of society. Through the initiative of enterprising monks, Buddhism spread in China following the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 c.e. Much like the West following the fall of Rome, China entered an era of despair after four centuries of relative peace and stability. Like the West’s acceptance of Christianity as a religious answer in difficult times, the Chinese turned to Buddhism as a logical solution to their troubles. Chinese found Buddhism appealing because it reinforced both the Confucian stress on living a moral life and Daoist respect for the simplicity and ultimate reality of the natural realm.

Above all, Buddhism provided details on life after death in ways the previous Chinese religions did not. By the seventh century China’s rulers had accepted Buddhism as an official Chinese religion, albeit mainly as a source of rituals and philosophy appropriate to birth, death, and the afterlife, while Confucianism’s humanistic creed remained at the base of  everyday earthbound existence. Similarly, Buddhism’s ability to fit with prior animistic religious practices and its doctrine of ethnic and gender equity allowed it spread to Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan, where it was a central force in the founding of the Japanese imperial state.

In contrast to the early southern Asian literary tradition, which addressed religious issues, China’s Confucian literary tradition was concerned with secular existence, and especially addressed the necessary conditions for successful governance. Early Confucian tradition dictated that Chinese literary expression conform to rigid standards and have some secular value. Under the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties Chinese literary expression flowered in a wide range of Neo-Confucian writings that attempted to blend the Confucian and Buddhist traditions. Buddhism advocated literary creativity as an appropriate exploration of the human mind, an idea that reinforced the traditional Confucian expectation of human self-discipline. The perfected individual might then be a more productive member of society. Scholars, popular writers, and poets debated whether there should be a limit on government leadership. They stressed the need to believe once again in the moral capacities of humanity, and thus argued for a less regimented society as the means to inspire human creativity.

Medieval-era Chinese and Indian religious texts became the basis of oral recitations, theatrical performances, paintings, and temple and court iconography. The variety of these presentations engaged audiences in China, India, and neighboring Asian lands. Indirectly they provided lessons in Chinese and Indian history and ethics and allowed their diverse spectators to formulate a set of shared values. These values were essential to the creation of a sense of belonging to a common Asian community.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Monasticism

The term monasticism comes from the Greek word monos, meaning “alone.” Medieval monks embraced solitude by withdrawing from society to pursue a spiritual life. They believed that the quest to find God demanded a renunciation of the world, which marked the first step toward asceticism, or an austere life devoid of worldly pleasures. In the third and fourth centuries the first monks escaped the sins of earthly existence by wandering the deserts of Egypt, Syria, Judea, and Alexandria. Several narratives of the so-called desert fathers were recorded by scribes and served as sources of inspiration for devotees in the West.

The Italian abbot Saint Benedict (ca. 480–ca. 547) allegedly composed a rule for monks that outlines the Standard pattern of monastic observance. The Rule of Saint Benedict defines a monastic community as a single group of religious men cohabiting in a monastery, the official residence for religious men. According to the rule, each monastery must have one abbot, who functions as a paternalistic figure and a pastoral counselor for the novices (it being not uncommon for a member of the elite to give away a young child to God’s service). The monastery must be an autonomous, self-sufficient house in which monks perform manual labor as well as ecclesiastical duties. The general ethos of the abbey should resemble one of docility rather than pride. Essential routines should include prayer, work, and study, all intended to shelter the monks from the dangerous sensuality of the world. During the Middle Ages more extreme ascetics inflicted punish ments on their bodies, such as self-flagellation and fasting, to imitate the suffering of Christ. Monasteries were often placed in remote areas, suggesting silence and frugality. When they were not in the chapel, monks often were reading in the library or hand-copying manuscripts in the scriptorium. All monks studied Latin because the Vulgate, which is the Latin version of the Bible, was the only translation acceptable to the Catholic Church.

Because monasteries could be expensive to build and operate, they depended on wealthy patrons. The motives of these benefactors may have been a mixture of politics and piety. They believed that their endowments would safeguard their souls and those of their relatives in heaven. Moreover, the monks acted as intercessors for the military elite by praying for them during holy wars. The intricate details of the penance, or accounting for sins, in the Middle Ages perhaps explain the eagerness of political leaders to found and fund monasteries.

It is difficult indeed for the modern reader to imagine the extreme devotion and mental stamina required to execute the routine prayers, liturgical rituals, and long periods of reflection that constituted a medieval monk’s life. Novices commonly suffered beatings meant to enforce such discipline, and silence in the church, refectory (or dining area), and dormitory was strictly imposed.

In 1095 Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade in an effort to reaffirm papal authority by a series of military expeditions to Jerusalem. Because the Saracens (a common medieval term for Muslims) resisted Christianity, many medieval discourses demonized them, condemning them as the enemies of faith. The knights who participated in the holy wars against Islam were motivated by a guaranteed salvation. Although they were militant, they viewed themselves in the service of the church and therefore equated death in war to martyrdom. Presumably the knights were also bound to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, as were the clerics. But knighthood provided the ideal means of salvation for laymen not suited for cloistered life.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Family Values

Political rhetoric, a term especially but not (unfortunately) exclusively associated with conservatives. The term elevates models of the middleclass, two-parent monogamous heterosexual family as mores for all social issues, without recognizing the multiplicity of family forms, roles and challenges that constitute contemporary American society. Many conservatives have claimed that the lack of family values results in homosexuality singleparent families, teenage pregnancy drug abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence. Still, given the emotional and ideological appeal of the family it becomes a particularly divisive way of phrasing issues, especially when touted by white men with unstable marriages.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Louis Farrakhan

Louis Walcott grew up in Boston, MA where he became an accomplished musician, playing in the city’s nightclubs. In 1955 he was recruited by Malcolm X for the Nation of Islam, and became Louis X (referred to in Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965)). He was given the name Farrakhan by Elijah Muhammad about the same time that he replaced Malcolm as head of the Black Muslim Temple in Harlem, New York and as national spokesman for the organization. Three years after not being picked to succeed Elijah Muhammad on his death in 1975, Farrakhan broke with Wallace Muhammad and established his own Nation of Islam, which he said was the legitimate successor to the earlier organization. Unlike Muhammad, Farrakhan has engaged in politics extensively supporting Jesse Jackson for president in 1984, taking positions in international affairs supporting Libya’s Khadafi and making a series of widely reported anti-Semitic remarks. His influence extends beyond the Nation of Islam, as shown in his organization of the 1996 Million Man March in Washington, DC.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Habitat for Humanity International

Habitat for Humanity International, nonprofit Christian organization that seeks to eliminate substandard housing and homelessness by building affordable homes for low-income families. Founded in 1976, the organization has built more than 150,000 houses worldwide. The organization has its headquarters in Americus, Georgia, and has affiliates in more than 85 countries.

To provide adequate housing to families in need, Habitat for Humanity relies on volunteers and the families themselves to participate in the construction of new homes or renovation of existing homes. Qualifying families must invest hundreds of hours of their own labor into building their house, a requirement known as “sweat equity.” Houses are sold to families at no profit and financed with affordable, interest-free loans. Money from the sale of each house and from families’ monthly mortgage payments funds other Habitat for Humanity building projects. Although Habitat for Humanity is a Christian organization, volunteers and participating families may be of any religious background.

Habitat for Humanity was founded by former businessman Millard Fuller and his wife, Linda. In the mid-1960s, Fuller had become a millionaire through various business ventures, including apartment rentals and mail-order sales of tractor cushions, cookbooks, and Christmas decorations. In 1965 he decided to give away his fortune to charities. In the late 1960s the Fullers went to live at Koinonia Farm, a Christian farming community near Americus, Georgia. They joined with the founder of Koinonia, Baptist minister Clarence Jordan, to help poor, rural residents build and own their own homes. That project inspired the Fullers to move in 1973 to Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to apply the same model there. They returned to Georgia three years later to found Habitat for Humanity.

In 1984 former U.S. president Jimmy Carter became involved with Habitat for Humanity, leading a work group in the renovation of a building in New York City. That project provided national exposure for the organization and prompted Carter and Habitat for Humanity to sponsor the Jimmy Carter Work Project, established to build homes and call attention to the issue of substandard housing.

Partly as a result of the exposure brought about by Carter’s involvement, Habitat for Humanity grew dramatically. By the end of the decade it had affiliates in nearly 300 cities in the United States and Canada and in more than 30 developing countries. By the late 1990s it was one of the largest homebuilders in the United States.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Moral Reform

It is a truism that Americans periodically go on moral binges in which some citizens try to act as moral arbiters for all citizens. It is less obvious, however, that these sprees commonly reflect bitter resistance to extensive social change. Yet that has certainly been the case with the rapid urbanization of the nation. Secularization, loosening family ties, an increasingly multilingual populace, and new modes of pursuing pleasure undermined the village culture of an earlier era, and traditionalists responded in the first half of the twentieth century with various strategies intended to restore the moral guidelines of a village past in the urban nation.

Some of these reforms were meant to provide an institutional framework in which to teach proper morals and behavior to the urban poor. The playground movement early in the century, for instance, aimed to steer the children of immigrants away from the crude life of the streets and onto playgrounds where supervised team play would train them in both the cooperative and the competitive values needed to make them into good citizens. This “positive environmentalism” not only focused on what was wrong but also offered a constructive moral alternative.

A very different approach to moral reform was expressed in various repressive movements that sought not to teach the proper but to outlaw what was objectionable. Prostitution was one obvious target of social control, the sleazy urban dance hall another. But by far the most significant of these efforts was the war on the saloon.

Spearheaded by the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the Prohibition movement reached its goal when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1919. In its effort to dry up the nation the ASL drove people with clashing cultural styles into hostile camps and exposed the severe social strains of the era. The patrons of the saloon were largely urban workers—Catholics, Jews, and Eastern Orthodox recently arrived from the cultures of Southern and Eastern Europe where alcohol was a normal part of communal life. The middle-class ASL, on the other hand, was rooted in traditional Protestant views of family, social order, work, and the deferment of pleasure, and it perceived its foes as threats to this moral order. There were thus bitter ethnic, religious, and class feelings at work on both sides of the dry divide.

Although Prohibition did curtail drinking to a significant degree, it did not stem the tide of social change that had triggered the movement for moral reform in the first place. Thus, when Prohibition ended in 1933, other expressions of moral reformism flourished. Among these were pressures to influence the content of movies. Although censorship laws were already on the books in several states and dozens of towns and cities by the 1920s, movies grew more and more lurid, especially after the Depression cut into revenues in the early 1930s. Many believed that the new films posed a fundamental challenge to family, religion, patriotism, and general decency. Finally, in the face of a growing public outcry, congressional rumblings about “regulating” the industry, and threats by the newly organized Catholic Legion of Decency to boycott “condemned” films, the producers of movies agreed in 1934 to abide by the Motion Picture Production Code they had ignored since they approved it in 1930.

In general, the code had an extremely low tolerance for sex, profanity, gratuitous violence, and incitement to criminal behavior. The boundaries were so narrowly defined that the censors even tried to change Clark Gable’s famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone with the Wind to, “My dear, I don’t care.” Fortunately, they relented. Family values were promoted by banning any reference to prostitution, abortion, adultery, “perversion,” and birth control. The code had a positive side to it as well. It insisted that “correct standards of life …be presented” in motion pictures. Flag, country, and religion, for instance, had to be treated respectfully. Proper films, it claimed, would lead to proper character and proper ideals. Thus, the code expressed both the positive and the repressive aspects of earlier moral reform movements. Not until the 1950s was it effectively challenged.

Moral reformism touches upon some of the most sensitive issues of a relatively open society. Should personal morality be regulated by law? What is the proper balance between the will of the majority and the rights of a minority, or between the rights of the community and the rights of an individual? These have been vexing questions since the founding of the Republic, and there is no sign of easy answers in the near future.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Americans in the last half of the twentieth century often felt as if they had become suddenly inundated with an obsessive fascination with gender and sexuality. The most commonly evoked cause—the movement for equal rights for women that emerged out of the 1960s ferment (known to historians as feminism’s second wave)—has propelled fundamental alterations in women’s legal and personal status in many areas of the world. Yet, the very name—the “second wave”—suggests that what appears to be a “modern” issue carries significantly deeper roots.

When we discuss gender, we mean the assumptions made about and the social roles occupied by individuals with specific physical characteristics that we denote as “male” and “female.” Although we tend to assume two sexes (male and female) as “natural,” scholars have pointed out that other societies have had different ideas. Some believed that there was only one physical body (for example, that women were men turned inside out); other societies believed that there were three or even more sexes. The particular social assumption about how many sexes even exist is often more a reflection of gender beliefs than any empirical knowledge. For example, the fact that a small, but significant, number of infants are born every year with the physical characteristics of both a male and a female (known as “intersexed” in medical terminology) has only recently received extended public discussion. Many individuals argue that they are transgendered— belonging to neither “official” category of current gender identification. Since such basic gender identifications can be so fluid, it is not surprising that gendered ideas about what people should wear or the work they should do are also subject to dramatic change over time. In America, there have been ongoing historical struggles over the roles men and women should occupy—particularly in the public arena—since the country’s inception. The most famous battle—the movement for women’s right to vote—began officially in 1848 and took over seventy years of continuous activity until passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Dramatic changes in gender relations did accelerate in response to the Industrial Revolution. As more people moved into urban environments and as factory employment needs increased, it became less clear who was “supposed” to work in what locales and who was not. Simultaneously the rules for public activity proved less enforceable. Who was really there to tell the factory-shop girl she should not venture out to an evening’s entertainment? In a relatively short time, rigid assumptions about “acceptable” behavior for both men and women began to collapse under the pressure of real-life circumstances. By the 1920s, following feminism’s “First Wave,” American women both had the vote and had received more PhDs than they would for another sixty years. As the last fact reveals, gender assumptions are often the playthings of economic developments. Despite significant advances early in the twentieth century much progress for women seemed to disappear in the face of the economic and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. More traditional notions of gender roles reasserted themselves despite evidence of very real needs and possibilities to the contrary.

The growing dichotomy between supposed gender roles and actual gender behavior helped fuel the gender controversies in the last fifty years. The very fact that women successfully staffed defense-industry plants in large numbers during the Second World War—despite being told they were biologically unfit for such activity and fired once the war concluded—helped pave the way for important subsequent gender re-evaluation. While imagery in the 1950s presented a simple domestic life in which women stayed home, in fact women constituted the fastest-growing group entering the labor market during this period. White women working in the 1950s proved essential to creating the highly prized growing middle class. As the economy of the 1950s and 1960s expanded, career doors opened. Women refused to be limited by simple prejudice about “appropriate” work, and the movement for access to all employment categories gathered steam. It is this ongoing insistence that has vexed so many in the last quarter century. If gender assumptions are often shaped by economic circumstances, in America they are also determined by racial ideologies. Claims about proper “women’s” work often applied only to certain white women. Those arguing against women working outside the home rarely worried that a significant proportion of African American women always did just that. Indeed, without the highly circumscribed categories of domestic and menial labor enforced upon African Americans, both male and female, it is unlikely that so many white Americans could have so successfully entered that desirable middle class in the postSecond World War era.

While gender questions are often assumed to be “only” about women, the nature of masculinity also changed profoundly in the same period. In an age of increasing bureaucratization and technology physical strength and aggression—often hallmarks of behavior marked as “male”—became more liabilities than assets. Men have also had to adapt to women’s refusal to limit their activities to home and child rearing. Although the most apparent “beneficiaries” of the gender struggles are women, men have also been changed almost as dramatically.

If shifts in gender roles and even in gender itself have hardly occurred quietly debates over sexuality have raged even more loudly The topics of gender and sexuality are natural cousins because they often impact on each other. This linkage is nothing new.

Those studying sexuality in the late nineteenth century—a group of scientists known as sexologists—believed that they could determine “deviant” sexual practices based upon observed “improper” gender behavior. Thus, a quiet man who liked to cook was probably a homosexual; a woman with short hair who liked sports most likely a lesbian. As these examples indicate, stereotypes about sexuality remain even more obstinate over 100 years than do those about gender.

All societies have engaged in a wide variety of sexual practices. All societies have depicted or written about sexuality Americans are no different in this regard. The seemingly accelerated pace of public sexual controversy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a reflection of particular historical trends—some specific to the American context, some more reflective of broader changes.

The Industrial Revolution impacted sexual practice with the same force that it disrupted gender relations (and everything else). A stunning decline in average childbirth rates from eight children per family in 1800 to approximately three in 1900 trumpets the fact that heterosexuals made informed reproductive choices. On the farm, children were unpaid essential laborers. In the new post-industrial world order they became economic liabilities—mouths to be fed and impediments to capital accumulation. Men and women chose not to have children. They did not choose to stop having sex. In these raw demographic numbers lie the roots for much of what we call “modern sexuality.” Men and women needed to discuss their decision; they needed to negotiate; they needed to have access to contraceptive devices. Ultimately what they needed most was to find another way to understand and talk about the now primarily non-reproductive sexual practices they enjoyed with each other.

They did so in an increasingly urban environment that provided expanded anonymity and freedom from social restraints. The effects of modernization itself with developing leisure cultures, visual technologies, mass media and increasing mobility contributed to an expanded universe of sexual possibility and public presentation. All this was set in place in America by the 1920s. People wrote sex manuals for married couples; millions of dollars poured into sex education in the schools; Freud’s ideas became enormously popular and homosexual subcultures flourished in numerous cities around the country.

The very controversies that would so inflame the second half of the century appeared well underway during the first. As the twentieth century closed however, debates over both the proper place of sexuality and what sexuality is occupied the thoughts of many. Although the roots of these issues are apparent earlier, the claims made by the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s that women owned their own bodies and held the sole rights to reproductive authority produced the fundamental conflict within the heterosexual community. The development of the pill in 1960 provided strong medical support for women’s position. Completely divorced from reproduction, sexuality now demanded its own vocabulary The early twentiethcentury debates over female sexual satisfaction escalated into endless public discussions over how best to achieve sexual pleasure. Most importantly the battle for reproductive autonomy was truly joined with the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. This highly contested ruling formed the basis for years of struggle at whose core sat the question of women’s sexual choices.

The women’s movement set into motion a series of questions about sex, the answers to which seemed to call for greater sexual possibilities. Gays and lesbians, men and women who had already begun struggling for social acceptance in the 1950s, expanded that call into a demand for gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s. The debate over homosexuality has been as ferocious as the argument over abortion. As homosexual-rights activists press their claims for equal rights and full acceptance with greater success, those opposed grow increasingly insistent and point to what they argue is a general decline in moral values. They look to the increased presence of children born to those not married, the large number of heterosexuals who choose to live together without marrying and the widespread popularity of sexual themes in popular culture as examples of unacceptable sexual chaos. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress in 1996, which prohibited the federal government from legally recognizing a “homosexual marriage” (should a state permit such a union), reinforced the perception of many that heterosexual marriage—perhaps heterosexuality itself—had become and institution in jeopardy at the end of the twentieth century.

From the emergence of sexually explicit magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, like Playboy and Penthouse, which catered to private male sexual fantasy to the late twentieth-century expansion of pornography into the sexually integrated home through video, cable and the Internet, millions of Americans have responded eagerly to the much decried sexual culture. This continued discrepancy between values proclaimed and activities practiced has animated significant public discussion and numerous scholarly debates. Propelled also in large part by the women’s movement, scholars began to look at the history of sexuality and gender roles in society. French philosopher Michel Foucault provided the central impetus with his influential introduction to the History of Sexuality, Volume I, published initially in 1976. Foucault outlined the socially constructed nature of sexuality (a point long illustrated by anthropologists) and laid out key analytic techniques for those who might follow. Many did. Among the numerous texts produced by this next generation of scholars, several of the most important include: Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds) (1981); Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Scott (1988); Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kesofsky Sedgewick (1990); and Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1996). Theoretically challenging, late twentieth-century scholars provided new methods and languages for discussing gender. Although some critics claimed that such work remained isolated in an “ivory tower,” the development of this innovative scholarship clearly reflected the fact that the very real, day-to-day world of gender relations and sexuality surrounding everyone has been fundamentally transformed.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Human Agency

The concept of human agency refers to the ability of humans to make conscious choices and communicate these to other people. It stands in contrast to the simplistic concept of free will, which argues that our choices are not the process of causal chains of social interaction and ultimately are undetermined by such relations. Views that center on human agency make no such claims. Instead, it openly acknowledges that humans make decisions and impress them on the world only through some form of interaction with a larger collective. This has several ethical implications. First, human agency relies on personal efficacy. Only if humans see that their actions show results and render the desired effects will they continue to consciously be part of a larger social collective. Second, the degree of efficacy and interaction then depends on the ways in which human subjectivity is modified by power. Human agency is formed only within social interaction that is the result of power discourses. For example, an activist for an oppressed political minority party in a country dominated by a dictatorial regime probably has fewer possibilities to voice his or her opinion publicly (and to influence policy) than does the dictator. The activist is part of a hierarchical collective where one voice dominates all others. The activist’s power in directly facing the dictator is very limited, and such action might even be life threatening. But in cooperation with other dissidents, and in covert gatherings as well as public ones, the activist might be able to gradually develop a social movement that, through its collective voice and manpower, challenges and upstages the dictator. This exemplary case shows how human agency is placed in a social context and how power mediates the ways in which people communicate and challenge one another. When addressing human agency, social scientists always examine the relationship between individuals and societies and focus on how institutions such as governments mediate the power relations between these entities.

In addition to reflecting on the relationship between individuals and societies as it is controlled by power, the concept of human agency has been debated in the philosophy of science. In particular, it has raised the questions of what the object of scientific inquiry should be and how the scientist should relate to this entity. These relationships can best be addressed by looking at the discipline of geography itself. The emergence of a debate about the significance of human agency for the discipline of geography can be traced to the popularity of humanistic geography during the 1980s. At that time, a first serious examination of the role of the geographer in the research process occurred. Humanistic geographers spelled out the role of human agency in geography and provided a historical perspective and critique of how the discipline has dealt with this concept. They accused geography of too much focus on objects (inanimate materials) and too little emphasis on subjects (humans and their emotions, motives, and beliefs). The dominating philosophies of science that shaped geographic paradigms of the 20th century—most notably positivism and Marxism— undervalued or left aside the individual and collective power of human agency. Whereas the early human geography of the French school of Paul Vidal de la Blache focused on humans and their active role in transforming their environment within the constraints of nature, this interpretive understanding of people and their interactions with the landscape gave way to scientific inquiry based on positivist methodology. Geographers increasingly adopted a new approach to science that focused on collecting social facts disconnected from individual and collective human consciousness. In many ways, this emulated the data collection process of the scientific method as it was (and still is) dominant in the natural sciences. Following the quantitative revolution of the 1950s, spatial analysis modeled the economic and social patterns created by humans in the natural landscape and paid little attention, if any, to individual human behavior and motivations. Beginning in the 1960s, behavioral geography remedied this problem only partially by focusing on repetitive quantifiable phenomena of human behavior that could be modeled and portrayed in universalizing models. For example, there emerged a larger number of studies in human migration behavior that examined social, economic, and cultural motives of individuals for changing their residences; families, households, and single individuals were asked where and why they moved. Although many of these studies actually involved interviews and largescale survey research that actively included a population of research subjects, geographers nevertheless neglected to relate the motivations and patterns they observed to the social and political contexts in which they were formed. Statistical analyses summarized people’s motivations, but to a large degree the results disregarded how these were formed and in what social context they developed.

The influence of Marxist structuralism is another philosophical paradigm that has been critiqued by geographers concerned about human agency. Marxian political–economic analysis reduces actors to puppets unconsciously acting out the conceptual logic of capitalism and attributes human behavior to some hidden force beyond people’s awareness and control. In summary, geographers historically have situated the discipline at diametrically opposed starting points of analysis; whereas some approaches reduce human agency to measurable collective facts, others deny humans any form of agency and control. Recent theoretical approaches, such as feminism, structuration theory, poststructuralism, and psychoanalytical theory, have revived this debate and attempted to either merge structural and agency-based approaches in a unified theory or abandon the idea of human agency altogether.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Modernity

The concept of modernity has varied and complex uses but is generally used to designate one of three things: a historical era associated with a series of societal transformations that began in Europe and subsequently diffused to most of the globe, a distinctive form of consciousness or experience characteristic of that era, or an aesthetic or artistic movement (often referred to as “modernism”) concerned with exploring or representing this modern experience.

There is little agreement about the precise temporal boundaries of modernity, but its roots lay in the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries and its development is linked to the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. During this time, European societies witnessed a series of important political and economic transformations that are generally associated with the modern era, including the expansion of capitalist markets and the progressive development of a system of factory production coupled later with mass consumption; the growing importance of salaried employment and an increasingly sophisticated division of labor; a significant increase in urbanization and the growth of a cosmopolitan urban citizenry, spurred by the evolution of widespread literacy; the development of specialized forms of knowledge and expertise, including the familiar practices of governance, civil service, and planning and design; and, following the French and American Revolutions, the establishment of the modern state system, founded on principles of territorial sovereignty and some form of electoral democracy. These social and institutional transformations culminated in the form of society that characterized Western Europe and North America from the late 19th century through the 20th century. Although this particular view of modernity emerged in a specific time and place, it has nevertheless been held up by many as a more or less universal model to be emulated by societies around the world. Thus, those parts of the world labeled as traditional societies have been encouraged to foster development through the adoption of Western-style political and economic institutions, a process generally referred to as modernization.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Feminine Power

Śakti (Energy) is the divine feminine in Hindu tradition, and those who worship her are called Śāktas. She is often called by the generic term Devī (Goddess). Hindus tell many stories about Devī — and her various manifestations are known by specific names, including Durgā, Kālī, Lakṣmī and Sarasvatī. Sometimes Śakti accompanies Śiva or Viṣṇu (as himself and in his incarnations as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa). But Śāktas tend to see the goddess as a powerfully independent figure. Some forms of Devī are widely known in India, while others are fairly localized. Hindus in the eastern area of the Indian subcontinent (Bengal) seem to have been particularly interested in the goddess, both in her local and pan-Indian forms.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Veterans Day

Every year on November 11, people in the United States celebrate Veterans Day. The holiday honors veterans, or people who served in the U.S. military. The day especially honors those veterans who died while fighting in a war. To celebrate Veterans Day, some cities and towns have parades. Veterans from the area may march in the parades. Sometimes people visit cemeteries on Veterans Day. People may put flowers or flags on the graves of veterans to honor them.

Before it got the name of Veterans Day, November 11 was called Armistice Day. November 11, 1918, was the day of the armistice (agreement to stop fighting) that endedWorldWar I.

The United States celebrated the first Armistice Day in 1919. Armistice Day became an official holiday in 1938. U.S. forces later fought inWorldWar II (1939–45) and the KoreanWar (1950–53). In 1954 Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day to honor veterans of all wars.

People in Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom also honor veterans on a day in November. Canada and the United Kingdom call the holiday Remembrance Day. On November 11, people across Europe remember the end of World War I.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Veda

The ancient sacred texts of Hinduism are called the Veda, which means “knowledge.” Hindus composed these texts in what is now India over hundreds of years, beginning in about 1500 BC. For a long time they passed down the texts of the Veda by reciting them. Eventually they wrote the texts down. Hindus today still study the Veda.

The earliest parts of the Veda are four collections of hymns (songs and poems) known as the Vedas. The first, the Rigveda, contains more than 1,000 hymns about Hindu gods and rituals. The Yajurveda helped priests follow these rituals. The Samaveda contains verses that priests chanted or sang. The Atharvaveda includes magic spells and rituals. It differs from the other Vedas because it is based more on everyday religious ideas than on the lives of the gods.

The Veda also includes the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads. These texts comment on the earlier Vedas. They explain the importance and deeper meanings of Hindu rituals and beliefs.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Heterosexuality

Normative sexual practice in the United States, entailing sexual and other relations between those gendered as male and those gendered as female, usually in dyadic couples. Reinforced by media images of love and romance, by legal and religious covenants of marriage and by social interactions, this norm is generally only called into question by recognition of alternative practice or calls to avoid implicit prejudices (heterosexist speech, for example) in politically sensitive settings. Given the widespread acceptance of the way “things are,” questions about heterosexuality—whether as a general practice or in reference to a specific figure like a celebrity—also evoke intense responses and defenses.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Bushido

Bushido is an ethical system based on the relationship between a samurai warrior and his overlord. The essential feature of this ethic is the relationship between master and vassal, with allegiance owed to the master by the samurai and care owed to the vassal warrior by the master. The master-vassal association, the core of Bushido, is reflected in the Japanese model of corporate management—that is, the spirit of devotion by employees for the sake of the company culture while the company (the master) shows the employees mercy and sympathy in ways such as lifetime employment, the seniority-centered employment system, and the “ringi system” of decision making. The latter is based on the rule of consensus, which encourages employee teamwork and unity in spirit. Furthermore, it leads employees to share fundamental values of “mutual trust and mutual responsibility” as if the company were a feudal domain. It should be noted, however, that Japanese corporate management and governance are evolving, embracing both Bushido and Anglo-American models of corporate management and governance.

The term Bushi, or samurai, can be traced back to the middle of the Heian period (782–1191). However, there was no such term Bushido. The ethics of the samurai in the Japanese medieval world (1192–1603) and the word Bushido (Bu = military, shi = knight, do = ways) were coined during the early times of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867). And the moral path that the Bushi, the warriors, were required to observe has been passed on for more than 800 years.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Multicultural and Global Feminism

Common to all the feminisms discussed in the foregoing is a desire to view women as somehow the same. There is a problem with stressing women’s sisterhood and solidarity, however. Not only are women different from men, they are also different from each other. Women’s class, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and so forth are not uniform. This point about women’s differences, and not confusing one kind of woman (white,Western, middle-class) with all women or women in general, is the core conviction of both multicultural and global feminism.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of “cultural diversity” captured the attention of major institutions in the United States, and multicultural feminism emerged as part of this celebration of diversity. Gender is neither the only nor necessarily the main cause of many women’s oppression, according to multicultural feminists. As they see it, depending on her race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual orientation, age, health status, and level of education, one woman’s oppression may be another woman’s liberation. Just because college-educated housewives in suburbia seek release from their domestic duties so they can get jobs in corporate America, it does not mean that female assembly-line workers do not yearn to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. More generally, just because many women find that matters related to their sexuality and reproductive capacities and responsibilities play the greatest role in their oppression, it does not mean that all women find this to be the case. For some women, not sexism, but racism, ethnocentrism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and/or ageism are the major contributors to their low status.

884———Feminist Theory Multicultural feminists replace discussions of sexism and androcentrism with discussions of interlocking systems of oppression (gender, race, and class) and women of color’s and other marginalized women’s multiple jeopardizes. Although a privileged white woman may hit her head against a glass ceiling or two in her lifetime, she will not have to face the kind of obstacles a Native American woman with limited education opportunities, severe diabetes, intermittent depression, and an alcoholic husband has to face.

Nor will she have to contend with the kind of hardships that an undocumented Mexican woman in the United States accepts as her lot—as the price of admission to a better life for her children. As multicultural feminists see it, sexism, racism, classism, ableism, elitism—indeed all the “isms” that divide people—interlock and choke whomever they catch in their grip. Oppression is a many-headed beast capable of rearing any one of its heads depending on the situation. The whole body of the beast is the appropriate target for multicultural feminists who wish to end its reign of terror, and, depending on her situation, each woman must pick and choose her battles. Global feminism differs from multicultural feminism because it focuses not on women in any one nation-state but on how the condition of women anywhere in the world affects the condition of women everywhere else in the world. Agreeing with multicultural feminists that feminism cannot ignore women’s cultural differences, global feminists nonetheless strive to create alliances among women worldwide. They have two goals in common. The first is to convince all nations to honor women’s right to make free choices about matters related to their reproductive and sexual capacities and responsibilities. Without the ability to control their own bodies, women cannot feel like full human persons. The second, coequal goal of global feminists is to bring women (and men) together to create a more just social and economic order at the international level as well as the national level. Global feminists are activists as well as theorists; they are bent on creating a world in which all people, no matter where they live, have enough food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education to live full human lives.

Global feminists claim that women must forge strong international networks to eliminate the disparities that exist between the world’s wealthy people and the world’s poor people. For them, universal sisterhood is not a natural state of affairs but an ideal to achieve. Because of their nations’ condition, women in developing nations are often much more focused on economic, social, political issues than on the sexual and reproductive issues that have tended to preoccupy the interest of women in developed nations. As a result of women’s different national priorities, however, women’s conversations at international conferences have sometimes degenerated into shouting matches. In fact, at each of the three international women’s conferences the United Nations (UN) sponsored during the International Decade for Women (1975–1985)—in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985)—problems emerged among women who were variously identified as First World,Western, Northern, or from developed nations on the one hand and women who were variously identified as Third World, Eastern, Southern, or from developing nations on the other. By the 1995 women’s conference held in Beijing, however, global feminists had helped women resolve some of their cross-cultural differences and to appreciate some of their commonalities. This conference was pronounced a success by its participants, who forged a strong women’s human rights document at it.

Global feminists are proud of women’s international agreements, but they realize that women need to do more than talk about women’s human rights to create a just and equitable social order. Privileged feminists must, they say, be prepared to forsake some of their material luxuries so that disadvantaged women can secure the food, clothing, and shelter they and their families need to survive. Emphasizing that material goods are not in infinite supply and that scarcity of goods and services is increasingly the order of the day, global feminists claim that feminists must take the lead in living more simply and frugally so that life on earth can continue through this millennium and beyond. Unless privileged feminists stop being part of the world’s maldistribution system, they cannot in good conscience represent themselves as true opponents of the forces that coconspire to create and maintain systems of human domination and subordination.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Shame

Shame is an important mechanism in much of the world for discouraging unethical behavior. Shame may be defined as public censure and disapproval, whereas honor, its opposite, is public affirmation. Shame and honor may be endowed by one’s inherited circumstances or family station, but they also serve as negative and positive reinforcements of behavior. Shame takes many forms, including embarrassment, humiliation, loss of face, ridicule, punishment, expulsion from the family, and exile.

Relationship-Oriented Cultures Shame-based regulation of behavior is most prevalent in relationship-oriented cultures, which rely heavily on personal supervision. This is because the experience of shame, in the sense intended here, requires that other people take note of one’s behavior. A relationship orientation is typically found in non-Western countries. Direct supervision plays a central role in relationshiporiented cultures because authority resides in persons rather than in rules. Rules may be laid down, but they receive their legitimacy from the persons who lay

them down, such as parents, teachers, husbands, bosses, elders, or political leaders. These are also high-context cultures, in the sense that behavior norms need not be spelled out explicitly but are learned from the context of everyday life. Activities that superiors allow to proceed without immediate censure are assumed to be permissible.

Relationship-based behavior regulation can be seen in countless everyday business contexts. For example, department stores in relationship-based countries typically ask customers to pay a central cashier rather than the sales person who showed them the merchandise. The customer then brings a receipt to the sales person to pick up the items purchased. The reason for the central cashier is that direct and constant supervision of persons who handle money is viewed as necessary, and it is easier to supervise one person than many. Loss of face is a particularly important mechanism for enforcing behavior norms, as for instance in many Asian cultures. Exposure of bribery in the news media, for example, may lead to loss of face that is highly damaging to one’s personal and professional life even if there are no legal consequences. Loss of face is a powerful force, however, that must be managed with care in everyday business situations. For example, a boss who criticizes employees in front of their coworkers can cause serious loss of face that could lead to poor morale or resignations. It can also result in loss of face for the boss, and consequent erosion of authority, since the boss exhibited poor management skills. Generally, a boss should not cause employees to lose face unless they have already done so by demonstrating gross incompetence in front of their peers or unless their conduct is truly immoral rather than merely inept.

A relationship orientation tends to be associated with an ethic of care, which in turn stems from a conception of human nature defined by relatedness to others. In Confucian cultures, for example, one scarcely exists apart from the family, and in many African cultures, the village, not the individual, is the unit of human existence. As a result, one’s first concern is for those with whom one is connected—the extended family, friends, village, tribe, or ethnic group—since this is in essence concern for oneself. Cronyism and 1900———Shame nepotism, frowned on in the Western business world, may represent high moral virtue. Shame-based cultures do not reject justice but view it as a derivative value when it applies. Justice is important to the extent that it is grounded in the fact that caring for significant others is tantamount to caring for oneself. Shame is the primary form of social regulation because it results from a failure to care. Shame-based cultures may be susceptible to corruption in the form of bribery and kickbacks,

since personal relationships are necessary to getting things done. There is a constant temptation to create a relationship quickly by exchanging favors rather than by going through the long process of building mutual trust.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is the notion that values and mores are not universal but are instead completely determined by culture. This position, popularized by an earlier generation of Western anthropologists, stands in contrast to more traditional perspectives that root values in transcendent sources of meaning or in the universal experience of the human condition.

In the human rights arena, there is general agreement that human rights are universal. At the same time, most parties to the human rights discussion would be willing to acknowledge some variability between societies. Thus disagreements over the universality or relativity of human rights have tended to be confined to debates over human rights that bear on a limited domain of specific cultural practices. Because most such disagreements have arisen in the context of critiques of non-Western societies by Western human rights advocates, the question has arisen as to whether the points at issue really revolve around human rights, or whether Western chauvinists are actually engaged in an effort to supplant non-Western societies’ traditional values with Western values. In response, human rights activists have tended to question the sincerity of such analyses, implying that the concerns being expressed about Western cultural imperialism are little more than self-serving smokescreens put forward to divert criticism away from oppressive social arrangements.

To give an example, the issue of women in conservative Muslim countries inspires this kind of human rights debate. Western human rights activists argue that women in Islamic cultures are denied many of their human rights, including their right to function as autonomous individuals. Some Muslims respond that Islam defines certain roles for women and that to protest against these roles denies the cultural rights of Islamic states. The issue of “female circumcision,” called by human rights activists “female genital mutilation,” involves another such debate.

As part of this ongoing discussion, it has frequently been pointed out that the West in general, and the United States in particular, are quick to call attention to alleged human rights violations if it serves Western interests, but is slow to do so when it does not serve these interests. Furthermore, although the United States likes to portray itself as the global champion of human rights, its own human rights record leaves much to be desired—especially when one examines such historical phenomena as the displacement of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans by European Americans.

This viewpoint was evocatively expressed by Kishore Mahbubani in his 1992 essay, “The West and the Rest”: “[F]rom the viewpoint of many Third World citizens, human rights campaigns often have a bizarre quality. For many of them, it looks something like this: They are like hungry and diseased passengers on a leaky, overcrowded boat that is about to drift into treacherous waters, in which many of them will perish. The captain of the boat is often harsh, sometimes fairly and sometimes not. On the river banks stand a group of affluent, well-fed and well-intentioned onlookers. As soon as these onlookers witness a passenger being flogged or imprisoned or even deprived of the right to speak, they board the ship to intervene, protecting the passengers from the captain. But those passengers remain hungry and diseased. As soon as they try to swim to the banks into the arms of their benefactors, they are firmly returned to the boat, their primary sufferings unabated.” This essay, by a scholar who is also an official in the government of Singapore, has set the tone for the current debate. Mahbubani’s general viewpoint is not, however, unique. In 1991, the People’s Republic of China issued an official statement on human rights which read, in part, that “to people in developing countries, the most urgent human rights are still the right to subsistence and the right to economic, social and cultural development. Therefore, attention should first be given to the right to development.”

The unstated assumption in both of these documents is the premise that increasing individual freedoms in the political sphere undermines or otherwise acts as a brake on economic development. Defenders of the political establishment in countries like China, Singapore, and Malaysia further argue that the emphasis on political and civil rights by Western human rights organizations reflects the  individualistic orientation of the West’s cultural tradition. Asian cultural traditions, in contrast, emphasize such communitarian values as the economic welfare of the larger society. Thus, rather than asserting directly that human rights must take a back seat to economic development, spokespeople for the authoritarian regimes of Asia argue that such human rights as the right to maintain one’s cultural tradition and the right to economic well-being should take priority over political and civil rights. Finally, many defenses of the political status quo in authoritarian Asian countries assert or imply that such societies will gradually develop greater political freedoms and expanded civil rights after their economies become as prosperous as Western economies. Responses to this line of argument make a

number of different counterpoints. First, it is often the case that authoritarian regimes also fail to promote economic development. It is also not the case that democratic political systems invariably retard economic development. Thus the opposition between rapid economic growth and democratic political processes on which arguments against expanded political participation is based is a fallacy.

Second, while the contemporary human rights movement arose in the West, it is inaccurate to assert that Asian culture in general is inhospitable to human rights. In point of fact, neither the West nor the East possess monolithic cultural traditions, although the consensus of both is to balance social concerns and responsibilities with the rights of individuals.

Finally, Asian countries with authoritarian political regimes have, in general, rushed to embrace other aspects of Westernization with little concern over the potential impact on traditional culture and traditional social arrangements. Confining resistance to Westernization to the arena of civil and political rights is thus transparently self-serving. It seems clear that some defenders of cultural relativism are simply using the concept as a smokescreen for cruelty and oppression.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Masculinity

Many scholars, such as Gail Bederman and Michael Davitt Bell, have noted the ideological, aesthetic and performative variations and inconsistencies underscoring the cultural terms that define American manhood. At the same time, these and many other scholars (including George Chauncey E.Anthony Rotundo, Michael S. Kimmel) recognize a persistent historical anxiety that drives the vigorous activity of the masculine enterprise. As these scholars see it, the anxietyproducing agent that enables the historical concepts of masculinity is the perceived threat of cultural effeminization. The rise of the new woman at the turn of the nineteenth century and her entry into the industrial-age workforce triggered a considerable cause for worry. The rapid development of industrial capitalism spawned paradoxical response since, on the one hand, the industrial age promised a virile and efficient world. On the other hand, the very same notions of progress ushered in quite a few unmanly and thereby undesirable social elements. One might suggest that the hyper-virile antics of American men at this time (weightlifting, sport) served as an activity to contain cultural excess, i.e. the feminine. Thus, the discourse of cultural conditions was often framed along gender lines: “effeminacy” was the sweeping generalization assigned to the cause of any ill-effect attending modern society. Sloth, “neurasthenia,” homosexuality and other purported weaknesses observed in/ on the male body were paradigmatic dysfunctions directly related to the “effeminizing” of American culture.

American artists, statesmen and religious individuals took to the cause of mastering the cultural parameters of masculinity that were apparently put at risk by cultural and corporeal effeminization. Ironically, the rigor with which men engaged the physical and emotional reconfiguration of manhood was often demonstrated with comical if not cartoon-like effect. “Sandow the Strongman” in Edison’s film shorts (c. 1896) or the steel-like men that dominated the 1930s paintings of Thomas Hart Benton highlight the hyperbolic work involved with the presentation of virile American manhood. Arguably, movies have been most instrumental in the shaping of an American consciousness of a masculine ideal during the twentieth century. Hollywood masculinity, however, is as varied as the cultural conditions that manufacture masculine identity Shifting between the likes of Sandow and Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Fred Astaire, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood’s representation of masculinity allows multiple, conflictive readings.

One thing remains certain: if the terms of masculinity are varied and are established relative to the contemporary (and mobile) discourse of “femininity” the bête noir of culture is an uncontained effeminacy of masculinity that announces itself as homosexual. It is no surprise, then, that some American men have practically made a career out of defending their perceived unmasculine dispositions as differential masculinity Politician Theodore Roosevelt’s aristocratic upbringing ushered in charges of dilletanti politics by not a few New York State assemblymen in 1882, who calculatingly called him an “Oscar Wilde”; dancer/choreographer Gene Kelly produced a television program in 1958 entitled Dancing, A Man’s Game to prove that ballet and baseball were really carved out of the same manly tradition; actor Kevin Spacey told the world that he intends to have children in hopes of refuting Esquire Magazine’s claims that he is gay The inability to define a true American masculinity cuts across issues of race as well (although the terms that define American manhood usually find themselves organized around white man’s Judaeo-Christian principles). Black men in particular have been viewed as threats and temptations by whites, while their masculinity has been shaped by economic, political and social repression. A contemporary example of the inter-section of these themes is the emergence of the Christian Conservative Men’s Movement, “The Promise Keepers.” Established in 1990, the group proudly embraces (and is embraced by) Asian American, African American. WASP and Latino men who bond under the auspices of Christian (masculine) brotherhood. Multiculturalism is paradoxically useful in the conservative rhetoric that seeks to homogenize cultural identity. More importantly masculinity is defined here as a sacred promise that defends family and women. Writers such as Eve Sedgwick-Kosofsky and Donna Minkowitz have pointed out the perfidy (i.e. misogyny and homophobia) that underlies the sentiment of this sort of “kinder, gentler”

masculinity.

The contemporary American political arena has also witnessed discomfiting shifts in the ways that masculinity is approached and discussed in relationship to family and homosexuality. In the 2000 Republican presidential primary candidate John McCain found himself awkwardly defending his utterance regarding his “gaydar” that effectively allowed him to detect homosexuals in the military during the Vietnam War. Both the conservative right and gay lobbyists raised issue with McCain’s provocative remarks. In the White House, Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades certainly made him a prime candidate for the Promise Keeper’s “Reconciliation” program of prayer and devotion to family and wife. In the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s masculinity presented not the dangers of effeminate manhood as much as he demonstrated too much masculinity; too much heterosexuality. Balancing gender is a central goal of an ideal masculinity The fluctuating yet certainly tightly managed social dicta that seeks balance and defines the cultural “effeminate” (woman, homosexual) as the cultural obverse of the masculine also functions to maintain the necessary binary structures, like heterosexual marriage, so central to a capitalist economy But the ever-changing terms of the “masculine” (which perforce define the “feminine”) put women, in particular, in the most impossible of positions. If one is too feminine (according to a strain of masculine tradition), one embodies the debilitating characteristics of the atrophying state. If one is too masculine, one is suspect of non-normative sexual desire. Yet Judith Butler, Leslie Feinberg and Riki Anne Wilchins have troubled the calm of these masculine waters that seek to keep sexuality and gender under such bifurcated logic. Films such as Boys Don’t Cry (1999) have brought the uncertain state of masculinity (and its often violent resolution) into popular consciousness. American masculinity like much of American culture, is one of the contradictory discourses that simultaneously appears concrete and indefinable.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

The Festival of All Souls

Ullambana or Bon (festival), the Festival of All Souls in Mahayana Buddhism, celebrated in China, Korea, and Japan in honor of the dead, whose souls return to their former homes for the occasion. The origin of the Sanskrit name of the festival, Ullambana, is uncertain but appears in early Buddhist holy writings known as sutras. These stories tell how Sariputra and Mandgalyayana, the two principal disciples of the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha, saved their mothers from needless suffering after death. From India, these stories honoring the dead reached China, a country already with a long tradition of ancestor worship. The Chinese assimilated certain Buddhist teachings into their ceremonies and began celebrating Ullumbana.

The return of the souls of the dead is celebrated by floating lanterns on water and by performing ceremonial dances. The souls so honored are both ancestors and the restless spirits of those who have died by accident. In Japan, the festival is called Bon and generally falls on August 13 through August 16 every year. During this period, family members return to their hometowns to visit the plots where ancestors are buried, ritually washing the gravestones and placing flowers and incense. Folk dancing, or bon-odori, and feasting usually accompany these rites.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/

Jinn

Intelligent creatures made of fire, often invisible, they are like humans in their capacity to receive God’s word and be saved, since the Qur’aˆn mentions that it was sent to both humans and jinn (Q. 72:1ff.). In the Qur’aˆ n, Iblıˆs is said to be a jinn, but he is also said to be an angel. This has caused considerable trouble to the commentators, and many theories have developed about the relationship between jinn and angels. It is generally held, however, that one of the main differences is that jinn, like humans, are capable of both sin and salvation and that the Qur’aˆn and Muhammad’s mission was to both groups. There is an immense folkloric literature about the jinn. They helped Sulaymaˆn with his activities, as they were able to take various shapes and carry out heavy work almost instantly.

The “genie” of the lamp in Western versions of the Thousand and One Nights is a folkloric version of the jinn. They are believed to sit on the walls around heaven, trying to listen in on God’s councils with the angels, and shooting stars are caused by the angels throwing things at them to drive them away. Jinn can appear as animals – a black cat, a dog, a fox – or as humans, either ordinary or grotesque. They can be helpful or harmful to humans, depending on whether or not they are of an evil nature or have been annoyed by humans. Pious behavior on the part of humans is the best defense against
them.

Read More: http://kambingputihblog.blogspot.com/